Tumblrs Take To Twitter

I chatted with an old friend on IM earlier about the fall of MySpace, particularly how Facebook was able to swoop down and gather its members so quickly. Two things came to mind: MySpace pages kept getting more complex and quite difficult for the average computer to load. And suddenly if you didn't have what MySpace interpreted to be an "up to date browser" you were shut out of the service.

Now, Tumblogs came crashing down Sunday and twitter was there to receive the digital refugees. A problem with one of Tumblr's database clusters took the site down sometime between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. Eastern time. The site announced the outage on Twitter, saying it was "incredibly sorry for the inconvenience." In a follow-up tweet Tumblr said that it is working through "a slow and painful recovery."

Founder David Karp told Tech Crunch, "Some scheduled maintenance yesterday that wasn't intended to interrupt service went haywire and wound up taking down a critical database cluster. Rebuilding the entire cluster has been a painfully slow and manual process, but we're almost through. We'll be posting a recap when we're back up."

If Twitter's past is Tumblr's prologue, chances are that most of Tumblr's users will stick by the company -- for now at least. But Tumblr's epic day of downtime does highlight a few important things.